ASUS will be the first to get an X58 board with SLI on the market according to Fudzilla. The reps were still under an NDA, so we don;t know exactly when these boards will first appear, the most detail they could give was Q4 some time. See what other little gems of information came up in the full article.

The usual specs for an HD4870 are 750MHz in the core and 900MHz for the RAM (aka 3600MHz) the Diamond Radeon HD 4870 XOC Black Edition's core runs at 800MHz and the RAM has been bumped to 1100MHz, or 4400MHz. The overclocked card does require a bit more juice, but not excessively so; it also won't be that much more expensive than the vanilla card once it becomes available. You can see how well it does against the 280 over at TweakTown.

The big theme at this years SIGGRAPH seems to be haptic interfaces, both as a control interface for software and as a way to provide direct physical feedback to the user. That isn't all though, nVIDIA's ray-tracing demo was shown there, as well as Intel's Larrabee getting a lot of focus. Drop by ExtremeTech to see what was shown, and get a peek at some nice pictures.

SUNNYVALE, Calif. - Aug. 12, 2008 - AMD (NYSE: AMD) today announced that it has entered into an agreement with Blizzard Entertainment that will allow AMD to bundle Blizzard’s best games across all ATI Radeon graphics products, to deliver a superior gaming experience. As the exclusive graphics sponsor for BlizzCon 2008 in Anaheim, Oct. 10-11, AMD will treat gamers to the unparalleled graphics capabilities of the ATI Radeon HD 4800 series in all PCs for game play at BlizzCon.

Just in case the OCZ NIA doesn't catch on quickly, the Alchemy Elixir Gaming Keyboard could fill the needs of gamers until they are ready to blink and twitch their way to the top of the scoreboard. It certainly doesn't hurt that the keyboard is over $100 less expensive than the headband, not that they keyboard

USB should be getting a bump in speed soon, as Intel presents version 0.9 of the USB 3.0 draft specs. Capable of handling up to 50Gb/s, attached storage should receive a nice bump in speed. They plan to first release it as a modified version of the familiar USB plug, but soon hope to include optical transmission as well. The Register has more here.

There is a new bit of action going down in our trading post, thanks to the efforts of PC Perspective members and the fine folks of Tiger Direct. We are pleased to bring new exclusive deals, starting today.

SANTA CLARA, CA - AUGUST 12, 2008 - Gamers would agree that they would love to see the worlds in their favorite games be depicted as realistically as possible. For total immersion, the gaming environment has to "feel" as real as possible, and characters must be able to move and interact with the objects in the environment that have a compelling, dramatic impact on game play. With customized physics effects, developers can design trees that bend in the wind, water that ebbs and flows naturally, and include objects in the environment that dramatically impact the gaming experience.